The invention relates to a method for controlling and/or regulating industrial processes, which runs on a hardware platform. This hardware platform can for instance be a PC, in particular an HMI (Human Machine Interface), or an industrial PC. For implementing the real-time capability, in addition to the standard operating system (which as a rule is not capable of real-time operation), a real-time module is also present on the hardware platform, for the controlling and/or regulating operations in real time, or else a real-time operating system is implemented on the hardware platform.
On a hardware platform, non-real-time applications can also run or be active—along with or under the real-time module or the real-time operating system. These non-real-time applications are active simultaneously with the aforementioned module or real-time operating system. This means that the non-real-time application should be allocated a suitable running time, that is, in particular, a component of an operating system cycle.
To that end, it is known for the operating cycle of a standard operating system to be subdivided by an interrupt controller, which for instance acts on the interrupt scheduler, into a real-time component and a non-real-time component. Furthermore, it is known for the time components of the operating cycle that occur in real time and non-real time respectively, to be fixedly allocated in the operating cycle.
Such a method is comparatively inflexible, since it cannot be adapted in a consistent system to all the real-time requirements that are typically required for industrial processes, especially real-time requirements that—depending on the process to be controlled/regulated—differ from one another. In particular, in the aforementioned method, the respective control/regulation of different industrial processes for using the various real-time applications is burdened by capacity requirements. Another factor is that the existing capacities of the controlling and/or regulating systems are poorly utilized, especially in complex processes of the kind that typically occur in industrial manufacture and/or machining.